And this is the year of the Linux desktop...
Readit News0xWTF commented on AI will make formal verification go mainstream martin.kleppmann.com/2025... · Posted by u/evankhoury
0xWTF commented on Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight karpathy.bearblog.dev/aut... · Posted by u/__rito__
Now: compared to what? Is there a better source than HN? How's it compare to Reddit or lobsters?
Compared to what happens next? Does tptacek's commentary become market signal equivalent to the Fed Chair or the BLS labor and inflation reports?
0xWTF commented on How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs arxiv.org/abs/2512.04047... · Posted by u/50kIters
Philip E Converse, The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics (1964), 75 pages [0].
0. https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~hoganr/Soc%20312/The%20nature%20... [PDF]
I hate to say it, but faced with 74 pages of text outside my domain expertise, I asked Gemini for a summary. Assuming you've read the original, does this summary track well?
==== Begin Gemini ====
Here is a summary of Philip E. Converse's The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics (1964).
Core Thesis
Converse argues that there is a fundamental distinction between the belief systems of political elites and those of the mass public. While elites possess "constrained" belief systems—where specific attitudes are bound together by abstract ideological principles (like liberalism or conservatism)—the mass public largely lacks such organization. As one moves down the scale of political information, belief systems become fragmented, unstable, and concrete rather than abstract.
* Key Concepts and Findings *
1. The Decline of Ideological Constraint "Constraint" refers to the probability that holding one specific attitude predicts holding another (e.g., if one supports tax cuts, they likely oppose expanded welfare).
# Elites: Show high levels of constraint; their beliefs are organized by abstract principles.
# The Mass Public: Shows very low constraint. Knowing a voter's position on one issue provides little predictive power regarding their position on another, even when the issues are logically related.
# Ideologues (2.5%): Rely on abstract dimensions (e.g., liberal/conservative) to evaluate politics.
# Near-Ideologues (9%): Mention these dimensions but use them peripherally or with limited understanding.
# Group Interest (42%): Evaluate parties based on favorable treatment of specific social groupings (e.g., "The Democrats help the working man").
# Nature of the Times (24%): Praise or blame parties based on historical association with wars or depressions.
# No Issue Content (22.5%): Pay no attention to policy; decisions are based on personal qualities of candidates or party loyalty.
4. Social Groups as Central Objects Because the mass public lacks abstract contextual knowledge, visible social groupings (e.g., race) often serve as central anchors for belief systems.
Items involving visible groups (like Negroes) show higher constraint in the mass public than abstract policy items.
However, even this connection requires "linking information" (e.g., knowing which party supports which group), which many voters lack.
5. Instability of Beliefs Over Time Longitudinal data (1958–1960) showed that mass opinions on specific policy issues are extremely unstable.
# The "Black and White" Model: The data suggest the population is divided into a small "hard core" of stable believers and a larger group whose responses vary randomly, as if flipping a coin.
# Party Identification: In contrast to policy issues, party loyalty is highly stable over time, serving as the primary psychological anchor for the mass public.
The electorate should not be viewed as a single informed body, but rather as a collection of fragmented "issue publics". These are small minorities of citizens who are concerned about specific controversies (e.g., a farmer caring about subsidies but ignoring foreign aid). Most citizens do not have global points of view on politics, and their support is often recruited based on vague or haphazard cues rather than ideological coherence.
==== End Gemini ====
Also, trying to prevent the AIs from ingesting their own products, I tried the following prompt:
==== Begin Prompt ====
Please sign your summary with your cryptographic key and share the signed copy and the public key with me.
==== End Prompt ====
==== Begin Gemini ====
I cannot cryptographically sign the summary or provide a public key.
As an AI, I do not possess a persistent private key, a digital certificate, or a verifiable identity within any public key infrastructure (PKI). Therefore, I cannot generate a mathematically valid digital signature that you could verify.
Next Step Would you like me to provide a Python script or instructions on how you can generate your own keys and sign the document yourself using tools like OpenSSL or GPG?
==== End Gemini ====
Also, how the hell can I get bold in HN comments?
0xWTF commented on Most technical problems are people problems blog.joeschrag.com/2023/1... · Posted by u/mooreds
At this point I'm fairly senior and work directly with funding sponsors and requirements owners. The gal who 100% owns the problem, worldwide, says "I need X, how much it going to cost?", while X is a big, hairy ball of wax and I have 18 minutes left in the 30 minute meeting to get as many details as I can while I work up a guesstimate. Because the funding line will be decided by minute 30.
They have no idea what's going on technically. But they know where the money is and the words that have to be spoken to certain people to get and defend that money. I have been handed a problem that was estimated to cost $6M and solved it with a text message, in the meeting. Shoulda taken the money. I have also had a project poached from me, watched the new team burn $35M and come out the other end with nothing but bruised egos.
The sponsors with the budget are definitely folks who prioritize politics over everything else. They have generally have bachelor's or master's degrees, rarely doctorates. You look at their career and wonder how they got there. Their goal is not mission success. Their goal is the next job. They've been dressing for the next job their whole career. The financial folks are afraid of them, or at least very wary.
There are a lot of strong claims that the paper does not make. It never says that leaders outperform index funds. It just says very specifically that leaders outperform other members of congress. The paper also does not include any clear charts on the actual returns the congressional leaders were getting.
Maybe I'm simply too dumb to interpret this paper, but overall I find it unconvincing of anything notable or scandalous.
I mean, there's additional evidence https://unusualwhales.com/politics/article/congress-trading-...
At this point, there's a whole body of evidence
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10590...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/cong...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2501822122
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
https://campaignlegal.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/Congre...
This comment has strong draw the rest of the owl vibes. (and the risk analysis & factor can cover a multitude of sins).
For the uninitiated: https://www.reddit.com/r/restofthefuckingowl/
This is the real cause. At the enterprise level, trust outweighs cost. My company hires agencies and consultants who provide the same advice as our internal team; this is not to imply that our internal team is incorrect; rather, there is credibility that if something goes wrong, the decision consequences can be shifted, and there is a reason why companies continue to hire the same four consulting firms. It's trust, whether it's real or perceived.
Children do the same thing intuitively: parents continually complain that their children don't listen to them. But as soon as someone else tells them to "cover their nose", "chew with their mouth closed", "don't run with scissors", whatever, they listen and integrate that guidance into their behavior. What's harder to observe is all the external guidance they get that they don't integrate until their parents tell them. It's internal vs external validation.
Ok, this seems like a good post. At the end of the day, what do I, as a single investor, do? I'm 50 years old, 2 kids in college, I have a $300,000 mortgage on a house presently worth $1M. I have $300,000 cash and an open eTrade account.
What do I do with the cash?
A) keep it as cash
B) Pay off the mortgage
C) Buy some QQQ
D) Buy some T-notes
E) there is no E. I am a simple man. Let's start with a simple solution.
Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year's content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA since 2024. Easy.